Writing & Thinking blogs

Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, writes essays on startups, programming, wealth, and independent thinking.

Top post: The Submarine (2005)

John Gruber writes about Apple, technology, and design, and created the Markdown format.

Top post: How to write a README file for GitHub (Markdown tips)

Gwern Branwen writes long, heavily researched essays on AI, statistics, nootropics, technology economics, and other subjects.

Top post: Laws of Tech Economics: Commoditize Your Complement

Scott Alexander writes long essays on medicine, science, politics, forecasting, and culture, continuing his earlier SlateStarCodex blog.

Top post: Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted to Know

Venkatesh Rao writes long essays on organizations, culture, technology, and how people make sense of modern life.

Top post: The Gervais Principle, or The Office According to "The Office"

Tim Urban writes illustrated, long-form explainers on topics like AI, procrastination, the Fermi paradox, Elon Musk, and politics.

Top post: The Road to Superintelligence (2015)

Quote Investigator is a research blog by Garson O'Toole that traces the true origins of famous quotations and sayings.

Top post: If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012)

qntm is the site of a writer who publishes science fiction, essays on software and time zones, and small web projects.

Top post: Lena

Jason Kottke runs a long-running link blog curating interesting items on culture, science, design, technology, and the web.

Top post: If you can’t explain something in simple terms, you don’t understand it

Maciej Ceglowski, who runs Pinboard, writes essays and talks on web bloat, technology criticism, history, and AI worries.

Top post: The Website Obesity Crisis

Shane Parrish's site on mental models, decision-making, and ideas from thinkers like Charlie Munger, with essays on concepts such as Chesterton's Fence.

Top post: This is Water by David Foster Wallace

Seth Godin writes short daily posts on marketing, ideas, work, and how people make choices.

Top post: Don't Shave That Yak

Maria Popova writes essays and book-based reflections on creativity, thinking, and the lives of notable writers and scientists.

Top post: How to Criticise with Kindness

Charlie Stross, a science fiction author, blogs about publishing, the future of technology, politics, and space.

Top post: Accelerando

Fields medalist Terence Tao writes about mathematics, research practice, formal proofs in Lean, and how to think about the subject.

Top post: Does one have to be a genius to do maths?

Dave Winer, a long-time software developer and RSS pioneer, blogs about web standards, open social networks, and blogging itself.

Top post: Manifesto: Rules for standards-makers

Richard Gabriel, a Lisp and software patterns figure, writes essays on language design, including the well-known "Worse Is Better" series.

Top post: The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

Letters of Note collects and publishes notable letters, memos and correspondence from historical and famous figures.

Top post: Why Explore Space (1970)

Kalid Azad writes math tutorials that build intuition for topics like Fourier transforms, linear algebra, Bayes' theorem and Euler's formula.

Top post: An Interactive Guide to the Fourier Transform (2012)

Mark Dominus writes The Universe of Discourse, covering math, programming, languages, and miscellaneous curiosities since 2006.

Top post: Monads are like burritos (2009)

Eric Meyer is a CSS expert who writes about web standards, accessibility and design, along with personal essays about his family.

Top post: “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author and digital rights activist whose site hosts his stories, novels and essays.

Top post: Spam Solutions

James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, writes about habits, decision making, mental models and self-improvement.

Top post: Atomic habits

The Awl was a general-interest website with essays on internet culture, media, food and technology.

Top post: A Taxonomy of Internet Chum (2015)

Medium Message is Medium's publication by Paul Ford and others, with essays on technology, the internet, nostalgia and mortality.

Top post: Everything Is Broken (2014)

Buttondown's blog comes from a small newsletter tool built by Justin Duke, with posts on software bugs, JavaScript history and tooling.

Top post: The Most Backdoor-Looking Bug I’ve Ever Seen

The Mission is a Medium publication with essays on startups, sales, personal growth, and technology, by various contributors.

Top post: The greatest sales deck I've ever seen (2016)

Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic, blogs about persuasion, personal systems, politics, and science.

Top post: Goals vs. Systems

Ansuz is the personal blog of Ben Sooke, covering software, copyright, fonts and social topics, best known for an essay on bits.

Top post: What colour are your bits? (2004)

Martin Kleppmann, author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications, writes on distributed systems, databases, local-first software, and formal verification.

Top post: Accounting for Computer Scientists

Tedium is a newsletter and site by Ernie Smith about odd technology history, the internet, and everyday objects.

Top post: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

Ben Hunt writes about markets, politics, and narrative, using finance and history to explain how stories shape public behavior.

Top post: The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

Shane Parrish's blog on mental models, decision making, and learning, drawing on figures like Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett.

Top post: The Munger Operating System: A Life That Really Works

John Scalzi, science fiction author, writes essays on writing, publishing, money, and culture, plus occasional short stories.

Top post: John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

Clay Shirky, a writer on internet culture and social media, publishes essays on online groups, media economics, and institutions.

Top post: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy

Matt Taibbi, an investigative journalist, writes on media, politics, censorship and press criticism, including Russiagate and mass media bias.

Top post: The American Press Is Destroying Itself

Andy Matuschak, a software developer and researcher, writes about learning, spaced repetition, and tools for thought, and created Sparkle.

Top post: Books and lectures don't work

Pseudonymous programmer writing humorous essays on software work, interviewing, punctuation, and a personal account of a drug overdose.

Top post: Programming Sucks

Blog of the iA design studio, which makes the iA Writer and iA Presenter apps, writing on typography, writing tools, and app business.

Top post: IA Writer: The Benchmark of Markdown Writing Apps

Maria Popova's literary blog, formerly Brain Pickings, collects essays on books, creativity, science, and ideas.

Top post: Umberto Eco's Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable Than Read Ones

Robert Heaton writes about programming projects, security and privacy investigations, algorithms, and personal essays.

Top post: “Stylish” browser extension steals all your internet history

Tom MacWright, a developer working on maps and web tools, writes about software, the modern web and working attitudes.

Top post: Lon Lat Lon Lat

Jeff Kaufman writes short personal posts on software, parenting, effective giving, and everyday measurements.

Top post: Donations

Scott Berkun is an author and former Microsoft manager who writes about project management, creative work, and workplace culture.

Top post: Asshole Driven Development

Dr. Drang, a retired engineer, writes about Unix tools, Python, Apple gear, charts, and programming, in a long-running personal blog.

Top post: Knuth and the Unix Way

Ben Kuhn, a tech worker, writes personal essays on startups, writing, work habits, programming and home setups.

Top post: Rooms can be as bright as the outdoors

Seth Godin writes a short daily post on marketing, work, creativity and business.

Top post: Don't Shave That Yak (2005)

Collaborative Fund's blog hosts essays by Morgan Housel on money, psychology, risk, and history.

Top post: The Psychology of Money

James Somers writes essays on learning, software, writing and science, and has also written for The New Yorker.

Top post: I should have loved biology

Pseudonymous writer who publishes detailed, readable investigations of commercial aviation accidents, covering causes, investigations, and safety lessons.

Top post: The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)

Nicholas Carr writes essays on how the internet and big tech companies change culture, attention, privacy, and media.

Top post: Rise of the wikicrats

Robin Sloan, a novelist and media inventor, writes about software, AI, writing, and the web.

Top post: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

Moxie Marlinspike, a security researcher and Signal creator, writes about cryptography, surveillance, and flaws in security tools and protocols.

Top post: Sslstrip

Matt Gemmell, a Scottish former Mac and iOS developer turned novelist, writes about writing, API design, and app development.

Top post: What have you tried? (2008)

N-Gate is an anonymous, sarcastic site that publishes satirical summaries of Hacker News discussions.

Top post: Satirical Summaries of Hacker News

Giles Bowkett, a programmer and writer, posts essays on software development, Scrum, Rails, careers and creative work, plus some self-published ebooks.

Top post: Giles Bowkett: Summon Monsters? Open The Door? Heal? Or Die?

Paul Buchheit, an early Google engineer and creator of Gmail, writes short essays on startups, products, and thinking.

Top post: If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good.

Maggie Appleton, a designer and researcher, writes about digital gardens, generative AI, and the web, with finely made visual essays.

Top post: A Brief History and Ethos of the Digital Garden

Markus Kuhn, a Cambridge computer security researcher, keeps reference pages on UTF-8, Unicode fonts, quotation marks, paper sizes and TV eavesdropping.

Top post: UTF-8 history (2003)

Lawrence Kesteloot, a software developer, writes essays on programming practice and the short story Coding Machines.

Top post: Coding Machines